I Wanted to Make a Game. Apparently I Also Needed an Ad Department.

Today's Swordoku development has involved very little of the bit where you make a game.

Instead, I've been getting the remaining Play integrations together, setting up ad networks, and working through consent, privacy, GDPR, COPPA, and the rest of the alphabet soup.

It's all in place.

I think.

This is NOT the fun stuff.

All this machinery for one test ad

I've been working through LevelPlay, Unity Ads, ironSource, and approximately seventeen other names that are starting to blur together. Jughead. Muffintop. At this point you could tell me either was an SDK and I'd probably open another dashboard.

We're starting with two ad networks while testing, rather than trying to connect every advertising company on the planet at once.

Even so, I'm still trying to get a test ad to show properly. So while a lot of the setup is there, I'm not quite ready to declare victory over the ad machinery.

I'd settle for it acknowledging my existence.

One ad after a dungeon? Maybe.

As much as I dislike the idea, I'm considering one interstitial ad after completing a dungeon. That's still a possibility, not a final decision.

A dungeon is a lot of waves to play through. In the structure I'm considering, you'd be looking at 50-plus game boards before seeing one, rather than an interruption every time you do something.

My hope is that optional rewarded ads, along with a no-ads purchase, will carry enough of the weight. I'm still figuring out the balance.

Which brings me to something I've been wanting to moan about.

Remove ads... until the season ends?

What the hell is going on with some of these games?

I've seen ad-removal offers that only last for the season. You pay to remove the ads, and then apparently the ads get a fresh invitation when the next season rolls around.

Congratulations on your purchase. We'll see you again shortly.

I've also seen games asking $29.99 just to remove ads. Not a bundle that includes all the other purchases. Just the ads. Then there are the other in-app purchases and the monthly season passes waiting alongside it.

I understand that games need to make money. I'm making one. But there is a point where monetisation starts feeling less like supporting a game and more like checking whether the player has any money left.

That's not an attitude I want to build around.

The less glamorous side of “nearly done”

I think most of the consent and privacy work is now in place, although there's still testing and checking to do. Setup being present and everything behaving correctly are two different milestones, as the test ad is very helpfully demonstrating.

This is the behind-the-scenes work that doesn't make a particularly exciting gameplay video: the legal and platform hoops, consent flows, and all the pieces that have to fit around showing an ad.

It matters. It's also a fairly efficient way to spend an entire day feeling like you haven't made a game.

On the brighter side, the UI now includes the privacy and licensing information, along with the About SquigglyFrog pages. Those are useful things to have properly accessible, even if implementing them involves considerably fewer dragons than I'd prefer.

Yes, I'm keeping the credits

I also replaced the credits scroller I'd been using with a custom setup.

I like having credits. People put work into games, and I want there to be somewhere that acknowledges that.

Too often, the attitude seems to be: get the customer playing immediately, get the ads running, get the purchases in front of them, and who cares who actually made any of it?

That makes me sick. A game should have a bit of identity beyond its ability to open a payment window.

I've been making my own games since the 80s, longer than plenty of the companies now calling themselves development teams and game studios have existed. I think that entitles me to the occasional moan.

Possibly a rant. With paragraphs.

Ah well. Back to the broken ad servers.

On the bright side.. I just tested the ads again, and surprisingly.. they worked!